Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsnuh | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it works like that... The company doesn't ask you if you'd like to switch to the cloud, and then you give a yes/no answer.

In my experience, what happens is there is a technology shift -- the company leadership decides they want to use the cloud (or use containers, or start moving their codebase to ${LANG}, etc.) and there is a group of employees that will lead this effort by learning and working with the new technologies, and there is another group that will actively oppose taking responsibility to learn about the new technology, and may actively work to sabotage or slow down the process.

View on HN

" and there is a group of employees that will lead this effort by learning and working with the new technologies, and there is another group that will actively oppose taking responsibility to learn about the new technology, and may actively work to sabotage or slow down the process. "

And I have seen groups that would like learn the new tech but never get involved by management.

True, I think it depends on the culture where the drivers of change come from, but in my experience that matters less than the fact that there is a change at all.

What is stopping a group from learning a new tech, regardless of whether change is organic or imposed by management? Or are you saying you have seen people get replaced with zero warning that new technology was being introduced? That's definitely not been my experience.

This was mainly in large companies where departments are quite large and the regular workers don't really see what's going on. I have seen people in one department being told to keep working on their current stuff while new people were hired for the new tech. Once the new people were up to speed the old department was laid off. There was no effort to get current employees involved.

The entire department? No one saw the writing on the wall and studied up on the new tech to stay relevant?

Consider our industries project failure rate. I've been on projects where it was the new team on the new tech stack that's let go and the guys maintaining the 20 year old system get a huge boost to their negotiating power.

When do you suggest that they find time to 'study up'? Most corporate environments in which I have worked have an assignment:time ratio greater than 1:1. Often there wasn't an opportunity to take the legal statutory lunch break nevermind study.

another group that will actively oppose taking responsibility to learn about the new technology, and may actively work to sabotage or slow down the process

Another perspective is that that group of employees was doing the unglamorous work of maintaining the legacy systems that kept the lights on and paid the bills while the lucky few got to play with new toys, and they were rewarded for their diligence with getting shafted. Been there, done that, lessons learned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com